Faking It

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made. ~ Groucho Marx

Fake is as old as the Eden tree. ~ Orson Welles

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision. ~ Robertson Davies

To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness. ~ Arthur Herzog

Anything that consoles is fake. ~ Iris Murdoch

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself – these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation. ~ Susan Sontag

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. ~ Seamus Heaney

You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. ~ William S. Burroughs

My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them. ~ Mitch Hedberg

I’d rather have a fake smile than a nasty stare. ~ Tamara Ecclestone

It’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. ~ Matt Damon

You can’t find true affection in Hollywood because everyone does the fake affection so well. ~ Carrie Fisher

Living in California, everyone learns to adapt their actor or actress within. ~ Courtney Carola

Any time you can involve fake mustaches, things are just better. ~ Graham Elliot

Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses. ~ Molly Crabapple

I think that turning on the charm without being fake is really important. ~ Miley Cyrus

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine – well, she’s asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it’s her equality that’s fake. ~ Rachel Cusk

There’s something magical about spending a Sunday night watching real people at a deli, then watching fake people pretending to be real on TV, then engaging in (arguably) false interaction with (arguably) real people on the Internet. Never at any prior point in time has this been possible. ~ Diablo Cody

If you wanna be famous, then it’s okay if the music is fake, because fame isn’t real. ~ Josh Homme

It became the joke of the neighborhood. If the umpire ruled me out on a bad call, I’d take the fake eye out and hand it to him. ~ Peter Falk

The hair is real – it’s the head that’s a fake. ~ Steve Allen

My husband gave me a necklace. It’s fake. I requested fake. Maybe I’m paranoid, but in this day and age, I don’t want something around my neck that’s worth more than my head. ~ Rita Rudner

I can’t get married. I can’t fake sleep for thirty years. ~ Elayne Boosler

My fake Japanese was smooth enough to earn me the title of ‘The Emperor of Pleasing Graciousness’ in that country. ~ Wolfman Jack

One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself. ~ Shannon L. Alder

I’ve perfected the art of the fake smile. It’s not so difficult when you are completely numb. ~ Bethany Griffin

If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Gospels] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor… That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. ~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, 4 August, 1820

All these angels start coming out of the boxes and everywhere, guys carrying crucifixes and stuff all over the place, and the whole bunch of them – thousands of them – singing “Come All Ye Faithful” like mad. Big deal. It’s supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can’t see anything religious or pretty, for God’s sake, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage. When they all finished and started going out the boxes again, you could tell they could hardly wait to get a cigarette of something. I saw it with old Sally Hayes the year before, and she kept saying how beautiful it was, the costumes and all. I said old Jesus probably would’ve puked if he could see it. ~ J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup. ~ John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

If you aren’t rich you should always look useful. ~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

In a world where happiness has become a social duty and sadness a public offense, life opens unrepentantly into a kaleidoscopic masquerade and a muddling carousel of faking. ~ Erik Pevernagie

Fake is the new real. You gotta keep a lot a shit to yourself. ~ Genereux Philip

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